Secular argument against gay marriage

[Peter_Plato]

What?

WHAT?

Where do these unfounded accusations come from, Planet Sushi or some place?

I’ve repeatedly said marriage is defined by the vows. YOU EVEN QUOTED ME SAYING THAT IN YOUR POST!!!

Cambridge online - Marriage: a legally accepted relationship between two people in which they live together, or the official ceremony that results in this.

dictionary.com - Marriage: the social institution under which a man and woman establish their decision to live as husband and wife by legal commitments, religious ceremonies, etc. Antonyms: separation. b. a similar institution involving partners of the same gender: gay marriage.

Merriam.Webster - Marriage: 1 a (1) : the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law (2) : the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage

See how that works? No theorizing, no inventing your own definitions on the fly, YOU LOOK UP THE WORD IN A DICTIONARY!!!

A “legally accepted relationship between two people”, not “a contract to make babies” nor “an agreement to procreate” nor anything else you might wish it to be.

If there was a really big , I’d use a really big at this point.

And by way of confirmation, just in case of any lingering desire to continue with your own private definition, here is the entire civil code of Spain (pdf), published in English by the Ministry of Justice. Go to page 14, article 44. It contains two sentences. The addition of the second was the only change needed for gay marriage. I expect the change in your country will be much the same.

Read it and weep, all your attempts to complicate everything, all your attempts to redefine marriage, all blown away.

You are still skirting the issue by claiming marriage to be a “legally accepted relationship” without providing a substantial statement of the nature of that relationship, Spanish legal documents notwithstanding (the mjustica link would not open).

Simply answer the question: What do you consider an appropriate definition of the relationship of marriage that could be or is to be the legally accepted definition that will not discriminate against other platonic relationships? That shouldn’t be too difficult for such an ardent defender of marriage as yourself. I want your definition - succinct and without reference to some other definition that relies on some other “commonly held” or “legally accepted” definition and therefore says nothing in terms of the nature of the relationship itself other than that it is recognized publicly or legally (which is all your dictionary definitions did.)

 

[Monkey1976]

As I just said to tonyrey, very little needs to happen to make gay marriage legal. In Spain it was just adding one paragraph to the civil code saying that matrimony shall have the same requisites and effects regardless of whether the persons involved are of the same or different sex:

Art. 44 El matrimonio tendrá los mismos requisitos y efectos cuando ambos contrayentes sean del mismo o de diferente sexo.

The change is very simple because of how marriage is defined.

The law can declare that a shape consisting of three sides is called a “circle”, but that doesn’t make it so.

You keep saying that but why would we care? In the Hammurabi code which you refer to above the wife was the property of the husband, it was nothing like our idea of marriage. In many cultures marriages were arranged. In our culture we have things like this:

In the 12th century the jurist Gratian, an influential founder of Canon law in medieval Europe, accepted age of puberty for marriage to be between 12 and 14 but acknowledged consent to be meaningful if the children were older than 7. There were authorities with a claim that consent could take place earlier. Marriage would then be valid as long as neither of the two parties annulled the marital agreement before reaching puberty, or if they had already consummated the marriage. It should be noted that Judges honored marriages based on mutual consent at ages younger than 7, in spite of what Gratian had said; there are recorded marriages of 2 and 3 year olds . - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age#Europe

It’s a myth that marriage has never changed, when actually it’s changed out of all recognition across the years.

Those are details. I’ve never said that the details haven’t changed. What I’m asserting is that there is a single characteristic of marriage that has held across all known cultures throughout history: That it only exists between male and female. Nothing you’ve posted above counters that.

From my first post I’ve been saying that (a) marriage is defined by the vows and that (b) a just society must not treat law-abiding citizens unequally without good reason.

Do you think either of those arguments are accusatory? That either of them are about selfishness? That either are irrational?

For these particular arguments, I’d say both are irrational: The vows are the acceptance of the responsibilities of the married state, which has already been defined. People with homosexual inclinations are already treated equally - they have the exact same right to marry a person of the opposite sex, subject to the same legal restrictions regarding previous marriage and familial relationship, as everyone else. How is it the state’s problem if they aren’t attracted to the opposite sex?

What’s being forgotten is that marriage isn’t for the benefit of the couple who enters into that state, but for the children born to and raised by that couple.

 

[inocente]

You are still skirting the issue by claiming marriage to be a “legally accepted relationship” without providing a substantial statement of the nature of that relationship, Spanish legal documents notwithstanding (the mjustica link would not open).

Simply answer the question: What do you consider an appropriate definition of the relationship of marriage that could be or is to be the legally accepted definition that will not discriminate against other platonic relationships? That shouldn’t be too difficult for such an ardent defender of marriage as yourself. I want your definition - succinct and without reference to some other definition that relies on some other “commonly held” or “legally accepted” definition and therefore says nothing in terms of the nature of the relationship itself other than that it is recognized publicly or legally (which is all your dictionary definitions did.)

I’ve answered your question over and over again.

You cannot go around making up your own private definitions, society decides what marriage is and I’ve repeatedly pointed out that society does not require married people to make babies or anything else you have made up on the spur of the moment. I’ve linked dictionary definitions and an entire civil code.

Surely you can understand that in law no one can enter into a relationship or contract unless they are explicitly aware of what it entails, and that courts refuse to enforce any agreement otherwise.

Surely therefore you can understand that marriage cannot possibly be about your or my private definitions, that marriage cannot possibly be about anything other than what is agreed in public before witnesses at the ceremony, and what is agreed to is THE VOWS.

If you really can’t understand this then please don’t keep on about it to me, I really don’t have the time right now for spoon-feeding or playing debating games, perhaps someone else can explain it to you.

 

[inocente]

I’ve answered your question over and over again.

You cannot go around making up your own private definitions, society decides what marriage is and I’ve repeatedly pointed out that society does not require married people to make babies or anything else you have made up on the spur of the moment. I’ve linked dictionary definitions and an entire civil code.

Surely you can understand that in law no one can enter into a relationship or contract unless they are explicitly aware of what it entails, and that courts refuse to enforce any agreement otherwise.

Surely therefore you can understand that marriage cannot possibly be about your or my private definitions, that marriage cannot possibly be about anything other than what is agreed in public before witnesses at the ceremony, and what is agreed to is THE VOWS.

If you really can’t understand this then please don’t keep on about it to me, I really don’t have the time right now for spoon-feeding or playing debating games, perhaps someone else can explain it to you.

 

[markeverett49]

I think this is in truth where a major part of the problem with this debate lies - the “secular” arguments put forwards against gay marriage rely on an underlying (religious) belief that there is something “wrong” or "disordered " or “sinful” about homosexuality. However, obviously those who do not share this religious belief find the arguments which depend upon this belief very weak. The arguments simply have no foundations without the religious belief. .

This is clearly false. Atheist professors of evolutionary theory see a stark difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. They ASSUME—with good reason—that heterosexuality is the norm for our sexually reproducing species (among others) and that homosexuality requires some sort of explanation because it is not obvious, from an evolutionary perspective, why homosexuality exists. Indeed, many evolutionary theorists see homosexuality as a problem, for it is a bedrock conviction of Darwinism that organisms leave behind as many offspring as possible. (Without such a motor, evolutionary theory cannot get going.)

What makes this more complicated, of course, is that homosexual people may be fertile and many have entered into natural marriages and produced offspring. (All arguments that would explain homosexuality as a “brake” on population growth run aground on this fact.)

In any case, from a biological point of view, sexual behaviors that can produce children who will need years of looking after are different than those which are infertile by design.
To say they are the same, or equivalent, is to bleed “the same” and “equivalent” of their normal meaning. Further, “getting married to start a family” is a common human desire that same-sex couples cannot enter into in the same way. (Though two homosexual people of the opposite sex could do this, or one homosexual person with a heterosexual person of the opposite sex.)

Most of the gay people I know—and many whose work I’ve read—mock “normality” and society’s “conventions.” The argument that same-sex couples want to live exactly the same way heterosexual couples do who get married to have and raise kids is one rarely heard espoused by gay people talking candidly among friends. That’s political PR.

 

[buffalo]

[No message]

 

[MJDorry]

I don’t see how you can have a secular argument about this or a lot of other issues really. If you take the basic atheist mindset “We came from nothing, there’s no point to anything we do, and we’re going back to nothing.”, then there’s no point arguing about “gay marriage” is there?

That’s just it, though, innit? Apart from the random sexual shenanigans of dolphins and bonobos, as far as ‘marriage’ is concerned, natural ‘mating’ only takes place between males and females in mammalia. And if you take Darwinian’s principle that species and evolution are driven by “survival of the fittest” at the literal face of it–that is, the successful passing on of genes–then gay marriage is an abomination to the secular evolutionary perspective as well.

 

[stewstew03]

But sex with children that was one of the things I listed for which you wanted reasoning behind its immorality.

One of the problems with incest that has nothing to do with infertility is that it tends to cause psychological harm. Also, incest taboo arguably helps prevent child abuse.

Taboos come and go. True or false: you support incest as long as it is between two consenting adults, with no possibility of children (resulting from the relationship).

Arguably, many, most, or even all of those things that our industries do to animals without their consent are immoral; There are many ethical vegetarians for a reason. Even if you aren’t persuaded into ethical vegetarianism, just because doing action A to an animal without its consent is moral doesn’t mean that doing action B to an animal is moral. There are different reasons why humanely killing an animal is moral, but submitting it to physical or potential psychological harm (such as rape) is not.

Even if you don’t accept the argument about consent, there is the health problem.

Are there health concerns with homosexual relationships?

 

[Biblepoe]

The human brain is structured in such a way that it functions best in certain environmental conditions. Our understanding of evolution strongly implies that this ideal environment is that which a species evolved in.

Not only is that not always true, but the environment in which humans evolved included homosexuals.

It may be true that general changes in conflict with our evolutionary psychology are not bad for every single individual. But you have no way of evaluating whether a given child would be an exception.

But we do have ways to test whether certain situations are generally goo/bad/OK for children; It’s why psychologists do research into childhood psychology and parenting. These psychologist typically roll their eyes when someone suggests that homosexuals are inferior parents. Studies have found same-sex parents to be just as good of parents of opposite-sex couples in the same circumstances (references can be provided upon request), so there is not need to speculate how the theory of evolution applies to same-sex parenting.

 

[markeverett49]

You asked for evidence and I provided it. .

No, you referred to two customs of (historically) recent vintage BOTH of which associate sexual activity with pregnancy and childrearing. This does NOT prove that, historically, no one believed marriage had anything to do with sex. Given that the Christian Church has taught for 2000 years that all sex outside of marriage is wrong, it is asinine to suggest no one ever thought marriage had anything to do with sex (or children) before.

One may reject the Church’s teaching on this matter but one cannot pretend this view is something recent.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I’ve answered your question over and over again.

You cannot go around making up your own private definitions, society decides what marriage is and I’ve repeatedly pointed out that society does not require married people to make babies or anything else you have made up on the spur of the moment. I’ve linked dictionary definitions and an entire civil code.

Surely you can understand that in law no one can enter into a relationship or contract unless they are explicitly aware of what it entails, and that courts refuse to enforce any agreement otherwise.

Surely therefore you can understand that marriage cannot possibly be about your or my private definitions, that marriage cannot possibly be about anything other than what is agreed in public before witnesses at the ceremony, and what is agreed to is THE VOWS.

If you really can’t understand this then please don’t keep on about it to me, I really don’t have the time right now for spoon-feeding or playing debating games, perhaps someone else can explain it to you.

No you haven’t. I explicitly asked for your understanding of what the marriage relationship should consist that makes it unique from other committed relationships. You haven’t given your understanding of the relationship, even though you claim to be a defender of marriage. How can you defend something that you cannot adequately explain other than with reference to a “generally accepted” understanding of the relationship, which explains nothing of what that relationship actually consists.

That is like saying your definition of “spiders” is the same as what people or scientists generally accept spiders to be. That provides precisely nothing in terms of an actual debatable point. My understanding is that this forum is intended to be about philosophical debate.

However, you are skirting the issue again. Just give YOUR definition of what the marriage relationship should consist to make it an actual “marriage” without dodging the question. Let’s see if that withstands logical analysis. So far your points are weak.

If, as you claim, “marriage cannot possibly be about anything other than what is agreed in public,” does that mean any VOWS agreed to in public should count as a “marriage,” even a committed, loving relationship between a father and adult son or daughter that does not involve sex? If they merely exchange vows in public, that should count as a marriage?

I am calling you out on your “game” of refusing to come clean because you haven’t got an idea of what the marriage relationship should consist without appeal to an argumentum ad populum, that you know very well does not actually define what the relationship actually should be, merely that it is publicly accepted as a “relationship.”

 

[tonyrey]

I think slavery is somewhat worse than discrimination.

You have not justified your comparison with marriage.

… In the same way, legalizing gay marriage removes any excuse to think discrimination against gays isn’t immoral.

Changing a name for a different relationship is not going to prevent people making excuses for discrimination.

No, as in my earlier post today to you, gay marriage doesn’t change anything. Even then for the life of me I can’t see how variation in parents’ dangly bits influences children’s welfare.

There is no discrimination when homosexuals have all the civil rights of heterosexual couples. It is illogical to demand the same name for a fundamentally different relationship.

Marriage is defined by the vows, not by the attempts to redefine it on this thread. And as proof, the legalization of gay marriage in Spain only needed one paragraph to be added to the civil code, “saying that Matrimony shall have the same requisites and effects regardless of whether the persons involved are of the same or different sex”.

Adding just one sentence - let alone a paragraph - constitutes a redefinition of marriage.

One of the earliest records of marriage vows is in the Sarum manual:

“I N. take the N. to my weddyd wyf to have and to holde fro thys day forwarde, for beter for wers, for richere for porere; in sykenesse and in hele [health]; tyl dethe us departe; if holy chyrche it wol ordeyne; and thereto I plycht the my trouthe.”

There is no mention of two “wyfs” or more than one “huseband”…

Yes, as I said, I can’t think of any reason why not.

Then you believe:

1. Men and women should be treated exactly the same with regard to their right to bear a child and suckle a baby?
2. If the father and mother are compelled to live apart through no fault of their own they have an equal right to possess a baby that is being suckled?
3. If the mother’s life is in danger from proceeding with the pregnancy they have an equal right to decide whether she should have the baby?

Perhaps it wasn’t you, but equality under the law is very important to most people, there must be a really good reason not to treat citizens equally or we think it highly unjust.

When homosexuals have equal civil rights they are not being treated unequally or unjustly simply because their different relationship has a different name. Inequality is not based on illogicality.

You were the one who raised the breakdown of marriage, not me.

You used it to justify SSM.

The issue is not adoption - a subject you brought up - but marriage.

So now you don’t care about the children anymore?

Non sequitur.

You are the one who was appealing to what you subjectively believe is normal, now you’re subjectively drawing lines as well.

In this context the issue is not normality but the increased risk of infection for the children.

If you want to continue on this line, you’ll need to lay out why you think gay marriage will affect the number of children living with gay couples (it won’t), and while you’re at it please cite evidence that the large numbers of such children over the years are in any way worse off than anyone else.

Please refer to post 253.

The mere fact that children are needlessly deprived of a mother or father by a homosexual “marriage” speaks for itself. Would you prefer to have been brought up without a father or mother?

Jesus didn’t need to state the obvious.

Precisely. He took it for granted that everyone understands that marriage is between a man and a woman.

My statement was that “A pervert is someone “whose sexual behavior is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable”, which has always included many, many, many married heterosexuals.”

Then your statement is defective because the activity of married heterosexuals is a private matter.

So take, for instance, Fifty Shades of Grey. An outright best seller. Lots of married people bought it while lots of other married people think it’s about abnormal and unacceptable behavior.

The issue is not what people regard as abnormal and unacceptable within traditional marriage.

Everyone has their own opinion of what is normal and abnormal. It’s subjective.

Is morality entirely a matter of opinion of what is normal and abnormal?

Yes, I think Christianity has an effect on all of our morality. Do you disagree then?

“Influenced” does not imply “determined” - which is evident in your concept of marriage.

You’ve provided no rationale as to why there are fundamental roles, as far as I can see you’re assuming that different dangly bits, or one high-pitched and one low-pitched voice are vitally important in raising children, but without any rhyme or reason.

Your obsession with the physical aspect of sex is consistent with your devaluation of the maternal and paternal roles in bringing up children. Do you believe they are not complementary?

My father’s brother lived with his male partner. They were just guys like other guys, both ex-army. If anything happened to my parents I guess they would have adopted me. If I’d lost my parents, I’d have wanted that, they loved me and I loved them.

The issue is whether you would prefer to have been brought up by a homosexual couple from the moment you were born.

 

[Biblepoe]

So is consent the only reason why pedophilia, incest and beastiality are immoral?

I have previously stated that it was one reason out of all the reasons why those things are immoral.

If you think that any of those things are moral apart from the ability to have children, that is your issue. I’d prefer to keep the thread focused on same-sex marriage.

If you have and still think that there is not a good enough secular argumant against same sex marriage, than could you please provide me with a strong secular argument for same sex marriage?

The approach should be to legalize something by default and ban it only with a good reason.

If you think there has been a good argument presented somewhere in this thread or elsewhere, feel free to present it again in your own words.

What is your reason for expanding the definition of marriage to include homosexual unions?

The main reason is that there is no good reason to exclude such relationships, and without such good reason, it is unequal protection under the law.

 

[stewstew03]

Not only is that not always true, but the environment in which humans evolved included homosexuals.

But we do have ways to test whether certain situations are generally goo/bad/OK for children; It’s why psychologists do research into childhood psychology and parenting. These psychologist typically roll their eyes when someone suggests that homosexuals are inferior parents. Studies have found same-sex parents to be just as good of parents of opposite-sex couples in the same circumstances (references can be provided upon request), so there is not need to speculate how the theory of evolution applies to same-sex parenting.

Please provide references. Not because I question your ability to provide them, but because I’d like to review the methodology.

 

[Biblepoe]

True or false: you support incest as long as it is between two consenting adults, with no possibility of children (resulting from the relationship).

If you no longer considered the ability to bear children relevant to sexual morality, would you then consider bestiality, incest, and pedophilia moral, or would you, like me, consider these other things immoral for other reasons? Would you really then not see the harm done by these things?

Are there health concerns with homosexual relationships?

There are health concerns with heterosexual relationships, and the same level of concerns with homosexual relationships, but they pale in comparison with the health concerns of bestiality.

 

[buffalo]

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[AmbroseSJ]

Thanks! Very sound reasoning.

 

[Biblepoe]

Please provide references. Not because I question your ability to provide them, but because I’d like to review the methodology.

For starters, here is a nice compendium of research on the issue of same-sex parents that provides references to relevant studies along with their abstracts. Here is another compendium that is a more recent and thorough (over 100 studies). Here is a relevant excerpt from the second one:

Examples of studies that have reported no differences in their samples according to the gender mix or sexuality of the children’s parents include no differences in: cognitive ability (e.g., Kirkpatrick, Smith & Roy, 1981; Green et al., 1986; Flaks et al., 1995); social competence and level of behavioural problems (Patterson, 1994); psychiatric rating (Kirkpatrick et al., 1981); and self-esteem (Huggins, 1989). Recent controlled studies in the US, the UK and Europe with children in intentional lesbian-parented families have found no difference in such things as anxiety, psychological adjustment, and school adjustment (e.g., MacCallum & Golombok, 2004; Vanfraussen, Ponjaert-Kristoffersen & Brewaeys, 2002; Wainright et al., 2004). For example, in their study involving early adolescent children from what they termed ‘father-present’ families (two heterosexual parents, n=38) and ‘father-absent’ families (which included 25 families of lesbian mothers and 38 families of single heterosexual mothers), MacCallum and Golombok (2004) found no differences in psychological adjustment as measured by a battery of standardised measures, including a standardised interview with the mothers, interviews with children using the Child and Adolescent Functioning and Environment Schedule (1991), completion of the Social Adjustment Inventory for Children and Adolescents (1987) by the children, and completion of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (1994) by mothers and teachers. Using the Child Behaviour Checklist, Gartrell and colleagues (2005, 2006) found no differences in psychological adjustment between children in planned lesbian-parented families who were conceived with sperm from a known donor and those who were conceived with sperm from an unknown donor.

 

[stewstew03]

For starters, here is a nice compendium of research on the issue of same-sex parents that provides references to relevant studies along with their abstracts. Here is another compendium that is a more recent and thorough (over 100 studies). Here is a relevant excerpt from the second one:

Thanks, I’ll take a look

 

[stewstew03]

If you no longer considered the ability to bear children relevant to sexual morality, would you then consider bestiality, incest, and pedophilia moral, or would you, like me, consider these other things immoral for other reasons? Would you really then not see the harm done by these things?

Sure - but I consider homosexuality immoral, too. I wasn’t aware that you did.

There are health concerns with heterosexual relationships, and the same level of concerns with homosexual relationships, but they pale in comparison with the health concerns of bestiality.